


clumsy, not creepy

by natigail



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Attempt at Humor, Clumsy Phil Lester, First Meetings, Gen, Ghost!Phil, M/M, Roommates, exhausted student!dan, kind of at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25711042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natigail/pseuds/natigail
Summary: Prompt: what if all those creepy things happening in your flat at night were ghosts who just bump into everything because they too need some light to see. also just clumsy ghosts who can’t help but push a vase off a table because they’re that clumsy. why do ghosts have to be creepy?Enter Philip Michael Lester – the clumsiest ghost in the world.And Daniel James Howell – the guy who didn’t believe in ghosts.Well, until he met one.
Relationships: Dan Howell & Phil Lester, Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 24
Kudos: 72





	clumsy, not creepy

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, I confess, it wasn't really a prompt but that ask came into my inbox like a year or two ago and I never answered it because it spurred this idea. I never finished the one shot because I didn't know how to end it but I think I found a nice way to cut it off. 
> 
> Warning: Phil is a ghost, so he's technically dead.

Dan was sure that he was imagining things.

He had to be imagining things.

Or maybe he was sleep walking. Well, not sleep walking but sleep decorating. He had heard that some people suffered from sleep sprinting, so if that was possible, then surely it was possible for someone to redecorate in their sleep. Right?

Dan looked down at the houseplant. It was a little frayed with brown at the edges, he would admit but it didn’t explain why is was standing on his kitchen counter instead of on the windowsill where he had put it. It could not have moved by itself overnight, despite plants being living things, which meant that someone else had moved it.

Dan lived alone and he always locked the door before he went to sleep. Even if someone had somehow managed to get into his place, why would they only move a plant? His laptop had still been by his bed when he’d woken up and his keys and wallet had been in their usual spot – tossed carelessly on the shelf in his hallway. He stared at the plant again, as if looking into the slightly withering leaves would give him any indication as to how it had been moved.

He knew it would have to be his own doing.

Dan would be the first to admit that he had been wrapped up in studying a lot lately, so maybe he had just started plant moving as part of a procrastination tactic and simply forgotten.

He touched one of the leaves and the brown part crumbled under his fingertips. He had not even been living here for a month yet, and he had bought the plant when he’d moved in. He knew it would be unlikely that he’d spend too much time out in nature and he hadn’t wanted to shut him in without at least a little something to release oxygen. He should probably have taken better care of his plant though, if it was already starting to wither. Dan couldn’t recall when he’d last watered it.

He tipped one of his drinking glasses under the tap, filled it to halfway and then dumped the water into the dried-up dirt.

For a second he felt like he could hear an audible sigh and he wondered if he was truly going insane. Why was his brain making him hear things that were clearly not there? He turned around, looking behind him and let his eyes sweep over his small space.

It was empty.

He knew that. He wasn’t sure why he had felt the urge to check.

Dan put the plant back in its designated spot on the windowsill and tried to put it out of his mind. However, before he packed up his bag to head to university, he did pause and create a daily reminder to water his plant. It might be a case that he’d keep just postponing the alarm and forgetting anyway but at least it was less likely that he’d forget the house plant’s existence again.

He really should never be responsible for keeping anything alive.

Dan forgot about the odd morning with the plant-moving for the next week and he was proud that he had managed to remember to water the plant roughly every other day. He felt like it was a big improvement.

Until he awoke one morning to find the windowsill empty again. He frowned as he rubbed his eyes and swung legs out until his toes meet with the cold floor. He felt groggy with sleep but he moved to the kitchen anyway, to see if he’d just repeated the same bizarre behaviour again.

But the plant was nowhere to be seen in the kitchen either.

It wasn’t until he walked back into his bedroom that he spotted it on top of his dresser. The frown between Dan’s eyebrows grew deeper. Why the hell would he have put it there?

He wondered in the back of his mind if this was something that he needed to be conscious of. Was sleep redecorating a sign of some underlying issue? Dan would have asked his therapist if he’d ever gathered up the courage to talk to one, never mind had the funds to support such an expensive service. Then again, a therapist would probably be more concerned with his depression and fragile self-worth over his odd sleep walking habits.

Dan moved the plant back to its designated spot. For a moment, he considered buying some adhesive tape or glue to see how his sleeping brain would tackle that one. He didn’t do it in the end. Mostly, because he was scared that his mind might start trying to move significantly bigger furniture and he did not need to wake up the following morning to find his sofa dragged into the hallway or something.

Three days later, Dan woke up to find the plant once more back on the dresser. He supressed the urge to scream into his pillow. Why was this happening to him?

He briefly considered consulting those bullshit dream interpreter sites because maybe they knew something about actions carried out while asleep as well. He had heard that you might go a little insane at university but he hadn’t thought that it would be like this.

He moved the plant back yet again. At this point, he was almost tempted to see if anything would happen if he just let it be but it felt too much like giving in and letting his sleep-self win. He didn’t want that.

Unsurprisingly, the plant had moved back to the dresser once again when he woke the following morning. Dan barely registered it this time, having enough trouble trying to keep his eyes open after a bad night’s sleep. His hands closed around the pot, ready to remove it, when he spotted something else.

A piece of paper. It was one of the utility bills that Dan had just let pile up on his counter, not ready to do anything to just yet. It wasn’t due for another couple of days. Now, it was odd that he was reorganising paper too but something else about it made Dan freeze in his steps.

There was something written across the paper, by hand.

_Too much sun!_

Dan read it again and again, while a feeling of dread ran down his spine. The letters were clear and structured and so very different from Dan’s own scrawl that he could hardly read. His heart started to beat faster in his chest.

What was more, he knew what pen that had wrote this, because of the unique purple colour. It was a fancy pen that he’d been gifted by his father but he never used it because the liquid came out a little too quickly and whenever Dan would write, he would smear his hand over the letters.

He had never managed to write something with the purple pen without having smudges all over the paper and his hand. The curse of the lefthanded.

The writing was impeccable, like it hadn’t been written by Dan’s hand at all. Like it should have been if he had written it.

Still, there must be a logical explanation.

Dan checked his hand, but there was no lingering ink on it either. He stared at the letters carefully put onto the paper, by just a slightly shaking hand. For a brief moment, Dan wondered if he was suffering from some type of split personality or the like. It didn’t seem likely but he wasn’t sure what else to make of it.

He had only just woken up and this whole thing was causing him a headache so he did what he did best. He took the paper, crumbling it and decided to repress this whole thing. It would undoubtedly come back to bite him in the arse but future to neglect to pay a bill, but Dan would have to deal with that instead.

His hand lingered on the plant, wondering if it would be better to just toss it out the window and be done with this whole thing. Something stopped him from doing that. He wasn’t exactly sure what but it felt like something he couldn’t fight against.

Dan left the plant on his dresser, deciding that maybe he didn’t want to mess with whatever the hell was going on in his flat. He would just ignore it and pretend that it didn’t exist.

A whole week passed without any incidents.

Dan would still water the plant, when his alarm went off, and he was surprised to see that it looked much better. The leaves stood up taller, its green colour seemed more vibrant and generally, it just looked like it was happier.

Dan was not happier. He was still very much creeped out but at least he had not had any messages left behind anymore or anything else in the flat moved.

He saw his mother for the first time in a few months. She had a day off and had insisted on coming by for a lunch. Dan hadn’t known how to get out of it. It was nice to see her, but it was also a strange mix of homesickness as well as being bloody happy that he had gotten out of that house.

So what if he had started to move plants around? At least it was his own space and he wouldn’t be judged for everything he did or didn’t do.

Before Dan left the lunch, his mother had pushed a box into his hands, saying that every flat needed at least one vase in case someone gave him flowers. Dan hadn’t been sure how to tell his mother that he wasn’t going to be getting any flowers, unless he bought them for himself, or maybe if his grandmother insisted on sending some. All the same, he had taken the vase with a smile and a word of thanks.

Dan put it down on his dresser for now, next to his mysterious plant.

He woke in the middle of the night to the sound of something shattering.

At first, he thought it was just a bad dream that had startled him away. He had sat up too fast, heart in his throat in the worst way and his eyes nervously flicked around his room. Nothing seemed out of order at first glance but then Dan noticed his dresser. His plant was fine, but the vase was not.

With a bit of dread in his stomach, Dan crawled to the edge of his bed to look at the floor below the dresser. He kept a tight grip on his duvet as if that could save him from anything. He felt better with it. His child-self had always thought that hiding under the duvet could ward off monsters and clearly, some of his adult-self still clung to that feeble belief.

The vase lay at the foot of the dresser. Cracked and broken.

Now, it shouldn’t have been scary but nothing in Dan’s room should have been able to knock that over. He slept with his window closed and not a gust of wind could make it in here. He was fairly sure that he hadn’t put the vase down at the edge of the dresser, since he remembered pushing it quite far in because he didn’t trust himself not to nudge into the dresser while getting dressed one sleepy morning. And it had been heavy, he had been internally complaining about its weight the whole trip back on the bus.

“I’m going insane,” Dan muttered out loud, heart still beating too fast in his chest.

He shouldn’t be scared. There was nothing to be scared of. What was he thinking was in here? Monsters? Demons? Ghosts?

Dan didn’t believe in any of that stuff.

Reluctantly, Dan got out of bed, duvet still wrapped around him, as he checked his front door and windows just to be sure. They were all locked. Dan’s place was small and there literally weren’t any places where someone could hide. He was completely alone in the flat.

Then what had knocked the vase over?

Dan had officially worked himself to a state where he couldn’t sleep anymore. He pulled on a hoodie and a pair of sweatpants, pulled his laptop into his school bag and headed out for the all-night library on campus, which was the only place that would be open in the middle of the night.

He didn’t like the idea of staying in his flat when he felt so on edge.

Dan had been dead on his feet for his morning lecture, several hours after he had arrived on campus, but he thankfully only had the one lecture that day. It felt better to return home to the flat in the daylight. Dan had convinced himself that it was just some weird elaborate dream or odd sleepwalking.

Weird, sure.

Bad, probably not.

Even if he could never let his mother know he broke the vase she had gifted him on the same day. He would never hear the end of it, even if he wasn’t even sure it had been his fault.

Dan entered his flat, tossed his keys and wallet onto the little shelf in the hallway, and walked into his kitchen to grab a drink. He had just managed to take a drag of the bottle, and he was closing the fridge door when he spotted it.

On his fridge that only boasted two magnets, there was something new pinned under one of them.

The back of an old torn piece of notebook that had Dan’s scribble notes on the other side.

_Sorry about the vase! Accident!_

Dan nearly dropped his bottle as he stumbled backwards but he held onto it stubbornly. He refused to become one of those maids in crime stories that discovered a body and dropped everything in their hands with a loud crash. Not that this was the same as finding a body, obviously.

Dan felt like he might be more equipped to handling that really.

He wondered if someone was playing an elaborate prank on him but how would they even get access to his flat? Then it should be someone who had access to the landlord’s keys and that seemed unlikely.

Dan ripped the note off the fridge, uncaring as the magnet clanged against the floor. Dan then slammed his bottle onto the counter and marched into his living room and glared around.

Dan was not a believer but this was weird. Too weird.

And something being too weird required weird approaches. Dan just needed to be able to sleep and only stress over university deadlines like every other kid in his class.

“Alright, whoever this is, it isn’t funny,” Dan grumbled, eyes still scanning the empty space in front of him. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on but I’m getting freaked out. And I have more than enough stuff to freak out about, you know? I’ve started on a degree that makes me want to rip my hair out half the time and I still haven’t come out to anyone in person. I don’t need this shit!”

Dan waved the note angrily around, feeling marginally better, even if he probably looked like the old man who shouted at clouds meme. At least, it felt a little cathartic to voice some of the things that had been going on in his head for so long.

“You’re gay too?”

Whatever Dan had expected from shouting at his empty room, it wasn’t for someone to actually answer.

Dan yelped, looking around but he still couldn’t see anything. He felt the blood drain from his face, and something tighten in his stomach. What the actual fuck…

“WHAT!” he shouted, feeling for the first time that he might be having some type of legitimate psychotic break.

“I asked, are you gay too?” the voice repeated.

It was a man’s voice. Slightly Northern by the sound of it, but that was probably to be expected in Manchester. Dan was still not following. Maybe, this was some elaborate plan, or a reality show that someone had signed him up to as a cruel joke. Could people even do that? Maybe.

“I’m going insane,” Dan said.

“No,” the voice said, gently now. “Not insane.”

“Stop talking!” Dan shouted and covered his ears.

The quiet settled again. Carefully, Dan pulled his hands from his ears. He could still not see anything when he looked around. He doubled checked his room, the kitchen and the hallway. Nothing.

But it had been empty this whole time, so Dan wasn’t sure what he was expecting to have suddenly showed up.

Then he realised he might have made a mistake by making the voice shut up. Wasn’t he finally getting somewhere for the first time in weeks? Even if that somewhere wasn’t anywhere that Dan would normally have let his mind go.

What kind of thing could have a disembowelled voice sounding like it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time?

Dan pinched his brow and let out a low hiss.

“Hello?” he called out.

Nothing.

“I’m… I’m sorry I told you to shut up?” Dan tried.

“I don’t like shouting,” the voice said. It sounded meek now, much weaker than before.

Dan still couldn’t see anything and even as he tried, he couldn’t locate the source of the voice either.

“Who are you?” Dan asked, and after a beat. “What are you?” just for good measure.

“I’m Phil!” the voice said, cheerfully. “And I’m…”

Phil’s voice trailed off. Dan was still trying to process everything. He felt like he had stepped into an alternate reality or something. It was also entirely possibly that he was suffering from some kind of psychotic break, if he thought he could actually talk to the air and get sensible replies. He wondered if his family had some history of mental illness that no one had ever told him.

“You’re…?” Dan prompted.

“You’ll laugh at me,” Phil said. “They always laugh.”

There was something heart-breaking about Phil’s voice but also odd. An otherworldly sense. His voice carried an echo whenever he spoke but it almost seemed to vibrate on the word _laugh._

Dan knew what it felt like to be laughed at and he felt a moment of empathy for this… voice? Phil? He remembered the laughs of his bullies from school still to this day. He might not think any of this was real, not really, but he would never seek to be cruel. No matter the situation.

“I won’t laugh,” Dan said. “I promise.”

“Pinky promise?”

Dan wasn’t sure how he was supposed to pull that off with a voice that he couldn’t even locate, let alone see belonging to any physical form.

“If you want.”

As soon as Dan had said it, something in front of his eyes shifted. Too quickly for him really to register it. It was like he blinked and then there was a guy in front of him. A tall guy with a dark fringe holding out his pinky finger and offering a small smile. He was blurry around the edges, tones of grey but there was definitely something in front of him. The guy was wearing clothes that didn’t quite look out of fashion, just a little dated with the style.

Dan was frozen in shock.

The guy – Phil? – pushed his hand out a little, pinky jutting out insistently.

Dan had been raised to be polite and he found that was what he reverted to when in stressful situations when nothing else worked. He moved his hand, going to link his pinky around the one offered to him.

He was almost surprised as he felt a press of something against him. It didn’t feel like a hand, not really, but it was something tangible. It left a tingle on Dan’s skin.

“I’m a ghost,” Phil said. He smiled at Dan, in a way that made his eyes crinkle.

Dan’s heart was surely about to either give up on him by jumping out of his chest or just stop beating entirely. He carefully pulled his hand back.

“Okay,” he said, more to himself than… Phil? The ghost. Phil. “I’m going to need to sit down.”

Dan’s body still felt like it moved on autopilot and he found himself sitting down and the edge of his sofa, elbows resting on his thighs as he clasped his hands together. He didn’t look to the middle of the living room where he could still see Phil in his peripheral vision.

Several minutes of silence must have passed.

Phil didn’t say anything. But he didn’t disappear either.

Dan could probably have sat in silence for hours, but Phil spoke up first.

“You’re taking it much better than most,” Phil said.

“I… what? You’ve told others?” Dan asked, momentarily distracted by how odd all of this was by the image of Phil popping up in front of others.

Others who were probably more sensible than Dan. Maybe, they tried to call the police. Or booked themselves an emergency therapy session. Or maybe, they believe in ghosts and instead they had been thrilled to find Phil in front of them.

A ghost. The word echoed oddly in Dan’s head.

“Yes,” Phil said. “I’ve tried to talk to all the people that I think are nice. Most… most start shouting at me, or… throwing stuff. Some… some get really scared.”

“Well, you say you’re a ghost, right?” Dan asked.

“Yes?” Phil confirmed, but he sounded confused.

“Ghosts are scary and creepy, Phil,” Dan said, and he did not want to think about how absurd this conversation was.

He kind of hated that his brain had already accepted that this was a real and tangible thing. It was way too vivid for Dan’s imagination. His mind might be a mess but he was fairly sure he couldn’t conjure up something like this on his own.

“Why do we have to be creepy?” Phil whined, and he sounded distinctively human like that. Adorable too. Dan could hear the pout in his voice, even if he still wasn’t looking at him. “I’m not creepy. Ghosts are just dead humans. Are humans scary and creepy?”

Dan opened his mouth to argue but then he closed it again. He wasn’t sure what to say. Calling humans creepy and scary might be a bit much, but some certainly were.

“I think it’s the dead aspect that gets people, Phil,” Dan said. His voice was calm. Why was he so calm? He should probably be running for the hills.

But a part of him was intrigued. He was curious beyond belief, because he was currently seeing something that he had never believed to be true. Still, he knew he had to be careful.

Curiosity killed the cat after all.

“But death is inevitable,” Phil said, simply. “It will happen to you all.”

“Do everyone turn into ghosts?”

“No,” Phil answered. When he didn’t elaborate, Dan finally looked over at him for the first time since he had broken the silence.

Phil was still standing in the middle of the room and he was wringing his hands in front of him. It looked slightly painful and like a nervous tick. Did ghosts get nervous? Could you still have nerves when you were dead?

“Okay, that’s… okay…”

“You don’t believe me?” Phil asked, and he looked at Dan with big and pleading eyes.

Against his better judgement, Dan gave an honest answer.

“I do believe you. All of this is too… freaky not to be real. I’m just processing. It’s a lot to take in. I never thoughts ghost existed. Let alone, in such a tangible form.”

“Oh, I can’t do this all the time,” Phil said, gesturing down at himself. “In fact, it’s been ages since I’ve done this. I can only do it when someone is talking to me.”

“How so?” Dan asked, still curious about this whole thing.

“I can… move things and stuff, but it requires a lot of energy. Like… actually talking or showing up requires someone to _want_ to talk to me. Like you.”

Dan was making this happen? Figures. He did always attract weirdos.

But while Phil was arguably weird, there didn’t seem to be anything malicious about him at all.

“Why did you move my plant?” Dan asked, suddenly remembering the weeks that he’d been questioning his sanity. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

Phil looked shy all of a sudden, folding his shoulders inwards. “Yes, it was me. But you were killing it! I had to look at it every day, just dying bit by bit.”

Dan could see how that could be frustrating, he guessed.

“Why don’t water it?”

Phil let out a snort and put his hands on his hips. “I just told you moving stuff is difficult. Water is heavy. Glasses are heavy. I’d… drop them. Break them. Like…”

“Like the vase.”

Phil started to wave his hands around. When he did so, it was like they became more blurred, almost as if they didn’t exist properly anymore.

“I’m so sorry about that! I hadn’t seen it before, and it was pretty and I swear I only meant to look but then suddenly, I had knocked it over! I scared myself so much.”

“Scared me too,” Dan said, grubbing the back of his neck.

“Sorry,” Phil muttered, apologising once more.

“It’s okay. It sounds like it was an accident.”

Dan wasn’t sure how to go on from here. Anyone who could see him now might call him insane. Unless they could see Phil too, he supposed. He was actually having a conversation with a ghost. He wondered how so many bad ghost shows could exist if this was how they normally were.

“I would offer to buy you a new one but I don’t have any money,” Phil said sheepishly.

Dan got up from his seat, and walked back over to stand in front of Phil again. He was surprised to find that they were actually the same height. Not a lot of people matched Dan’s height. It was kind of nice not having to adjust his posture and duck his neck.

“I said it’s fine, and I mean it. I’m really just glad to know that I’m not going insane. Or well, not that kind of insane. Talking to ghosts insane on the other hand…”

“You really are a sceptic, huh? Talking to a ghost and you still don’t believe. I would have argued so hard with you, if I’d still been alive. I always believed in ghosts. But now, I think my best argument is myself.”

Something soured in Dan’s stomach at the thought that Phil was dead. That this person, if you could call him that, had once been alive and now he was like this. Dan had so, so many questions. Too many.

But it had been a long day already, even if it was only a little past noon. Dan was still operating on only a couple hours of sleep. He had a headache brewing behind his eyes that was only partially Phil’s fault.

Phil was nothing like Dan had imagined ghosts if he had even been willing to entertain the idea. He might have said that ghosts were creepy. Stereotyping was telling him they were entities that haunted and messed with people, flipping switches and knocking things over to frighten you.

He hadn’t imagined that they would help you take care of your house plants or only break things because of their own clumsiness.

“Alright, Phil,” Dan said.

“Yes, Dan?” Phil asked.

For a beat, Dan wondered how Phil knew his name. “How did you…?”

“I can still read. Your name is on the door and on all your mail,” Phil said and waved at the stack of papers on his table. The pile of bills and odd notebook pages that seemed to mount up without Dan’s intention.

“Right, of course,” Dan said, ducking his head a little.

There had been something teasing in Phil’s voice. Just the edge of banter. A little pushing. Dan should probably be worried that he felt like he was getting along better with a ghost he had talked to for all of fifteen minutes than most of the people he had met in his classes.

It was probably unfair to call Phil the weird one, really.

“What did you want to ask me?” Phil asked, innocent and open.

Dan had so many things he wanted to ask him. About the afterlife, or at least this stuck in between thing that was happening to him. About who Phil had been before he died and how he had come to be a ghost. About how it had gone all the other times that Phil had revealed himself to people. His head was brimming with questions really.

The one that came out probably wasn’t the most important one, not by a long shot. It was completely unrelated, in fact, but Dan felt the urge to ask it all the same. To look for common ground between them.

“Do you like Muse?”

Phil’s whole face lit up.

“I love Muse!”

Yeah, Phil might be a ghost and Dan might be very weird for not being more freaked out – he had a feeling it would come later – but he had a distinctive feeling that they were going to get along all the same.

And now, he had someone to help him look after his house plant.

**Author's Note:**

> [Reblog on tumblr](https://secretlywritingstories.tumblr.com/post/625539015089782784/clumsy-not-creepy-phan-ghost-au)
> 
> Fun fact: This is my 100th work on AO3.
> 
> I hope you liked this silly one shot. I'll let your minds decide what happens with the boys moving forward, because writing anything where one of them is dead like this would kill my feels. But I still wanted to capture the fun of their first meeting.
> 
> Thank you for reading and comments are very welcome, as always.
> 
> I'm currently doing PEDIA (Posting Every Day In August) so I'm going to be uploading loads, also more phanfiction than this one.


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